You won’t find Stanley F. Pauley on Wikipedia, the Forbes 400 list or among the signers of the Giving Pledge. But the manufacturing magnate and his wife, Dorothy, have left a head-turning philanthropic legacy.
The couple passed away within six months of each other between late 2020 and early 2021 and appear to have left a fortune to their Richmond, Virginia-based philanthropies. The no-longer modestly sized Pauley Family Foundation is now a $2 billion grantmaker, and another family philanthropy, the Endeavor Legacy Foundation, has become a $761 million operation thanks to gifts from the pair’s estates.
At a time when tech billionaires are reconfiguring the philanthropic landscape by dropping billions into both new and established philanthropic operations, the Pauleys are a reminder that fortunes from more traditional industries remain a potent force in American giving. Silicon Valley wealth may capture headlines, but the United States has more than 700 billionaires who made their wealth in all sorts of ways, which all but ensures 10-digit philanthropies regularly pop up across the country.
The Pauley Family Foundation is also one of the latest in a select group of mega-philanthropies set up under a niche legal category known as a “supporting organization.” Typically hosted by community foundations, most supporting organizations tend to be smaller operations, but there are massive ones, such as the $4.9 billion George Kaiser Family Foundation. These structures offer less control than a private foundation, but more tax advantages and fewer payout or disclosure requirements.
In the Pauleys’ case, the giant new philanthropy is technically under the control of the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond, which holds the power to appoint a majority of the Pauley Family Foundation’s board members, while the couple’s heirs are in the minority. But as with donor-advised funds, common practice suggests that such control can be more legal than literal, provided donors stay broadly within the host organization’s mission. Lack of disclosure requirements also means we do not know who donated $1.9 billion to the foundation in 2021, though presumably, it was the Pauleys.
“The family prefers to be low profile and is not interested in speaking to the media,” said Kim Russell, senior vice president with the community foundation, in an email.
The couple’s newly rich philanthropies will most likely be a special boon for the family’s home state of Virginia. Nearly every penny spent by the two foundations in the last few years has gone to organizations in the state. Once the fourth-largest foundation in the state, the Pauley Family Foundation now appears to be Virginia’s biggest philanthropy, according to FoundationIQ. The Pauley family’s smaller foundation, Endeavor, is now fourth.
In fact, Virginia is undergoing something of a mega-philanthropy boom right now, partly due to older generations passing their fortunes to heirs. For instance, there’s the Red Gates Foundation, which received $2 billion in 2022 from the estate of William Hunter Goodwin III, the son of Richmond businessman William Goodwin Jr. Another case is the Barbara Brunckhorst Foundation, which has received more than $300 million from its namesake’s estate in recent years.
Likewise, the Pauley family is on track to become one of the most powerful philanthropic clans in the state, even if they technically comprise a minority voice on their family foundation. As such, they are one more example of heirs elevated to philanthropic kingmakers — as are the Buffett, Soros and Walton families — by their parents’ outsized success. They may prefer a low profile, but that could be challenging, given the power they now possess.
Here’s what grant seekers and potential partners may want to know about Virginia’s new philanthropic giants.
Who are the Pauleys?
An electric engineer by training, Stan Pauley founded and ran Carpenter Co., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of pillows, mattress pads and other polyurethane foam products. Today, the company reports more than 6,500 employees across more than 60 locations around the world.
It seems that Pauley has never made the Forbes billionaires list, but the outlet ranked his company as No. 212 on its list of “America’s largest private companies” in 2020, based on revenues of $2 billion. He was also once listed as the 18th-most powerful person in Richmond.
Dorothy Pauley was an English and arts history major, served on the boards of a variety of arts organizations and even sang soprano in the chorus of the Richmond Symphony, which has become a top grantee of the family’s foundation.
The couple, who were married for more than seven decades, began their philanthropic giving years ago. In their final years, they made many multimillion-dollar gifts to classic “eds and meds” recipients, including several awards that earned them naming rights for campus buildings.
For instance, at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical branch, known as VCU Health, the family’s donations helped launch the Pauley Heart Center. Stanley Pauley was a long-time cardiac patient at VCU. He also attended the University of Manitoba in Canada, which, thanks to his gifts, has both a Stanley Pauley Center and the Stanley Pauley Engineering Building. The Pauleys, incidentally, lived in Canada until moving to Richmond in the 1940s.
With the couple now passed, the Pauleys’ daughter, Katharine Pauley Hickok, is leading the family’s grantmaking.
Hickok has been chair of the family foundation since her father’s death, and she serves on the board alongside her two children, Kate Hickock Stark and Adam Hickok. Hickok is the long-time president of the Endeavor Legacy Foundation, whose only other board member is her husband, Eugene.
The Pauley Family Foundation’s board also has several appointees, including a retired credit union president, the chairman of a law firm and the former head of an investment company. Another is the former head of a different supporting organization of the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond, and several have served the community foundation in similar board roles. But that’s the closest connection any of the members currently have to the foundation’s host organization, according to Russell.
Where has the money gone so far?
If you’re hoping for a grant from the Pauleys, the first requirement is to be in Virginia. Between 2020 and 2021, all but one of the 147 grants issued by the family’s two philanthropies went to nonprofits in the state.
The Pauley Family Foundation’s grantmaking is “primarily focused on addressing needs in the Richmond region,” Russell said in a statement, “but the board has discretion and may choose to grant outside of this area from time to time.”
Assuming you are in the Commonwealth, your odds will improve if you run a college or a university. The foundation has four priority areas: arts and culture, education, healthy community and affordable housing. A review of its recent awards show educational institutions have received the lion’s share of its recent awards.
The foundation awarded most of its largest grants in the last few years to a private men’s liberal arts school, Hampden-Sydney College. Other top recipients have included the all-female Sweet Briar College and the University of Richmond, as well as the institutions mentioned earlier.
Grant seekers who run primary schools may also be in luck. The foundation has issued a number of large grants to Richmond-based St. Catherine’s School — where there’s a center named for the family — as well as smaller but substantial awards to the New Community School and St. Andrew’s School.
Housing groups have also received grants from the Pauleys, including the Better Housing Coalition, Area Congregations Together in Service (known as ACTS RVA) and the Maggie Walter Community Land Trust. Arts organizations also have a good shot. Aside from the Richmond Symphony, the foundation has recently made six-figure awards to Richmond Urban Dance and the Byrd Theatre.
The grantmaking track record is nearly identical at the family’s Endeavor Legacy Foundation, whose stated priorities are education, healthcare, arts and civil society. It has sent seven-figure checks to many of the same grantees as the family’s larger operation: Hampden-Sydney College, St. Catherine’s School, Medical College of Virginia, St. Andrew’s School and the Richmond Symphony.
Aside from that overlap, Endeavor Legacy has made substantial awards to the Children’s Hospital of Richmond and the Sweet Briar, VA chapter of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology.
More funding ahead?
The Pauley Family Foundation has more money than ever, and more than any foundation in Richmond has ever had before, but that will not necessarily translate into dollars in the hands of charities, whether in Richmond or beyond, at least in the short term.
In 2021, the year the foundation leapt into the elite ranks of multibillion-dollar philanthropies, the operation more than doubled its grantmaking, giving out nearly $26 million. That did not last. The foundation’s payout dropped to $6.9 million the following year, its lowest level since 2018, according to tax filings, and to $6.6 million in 2023, according to the community foundation.
Compare that with what would have been required if the Pauley Family Foundation was a private foundation rather than a public charity — a status that applies because it’s a supporting organization of the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond. If that was the case, the foundation would have been legally bound in each of those two years to spend at least 5% of its assets, or roughly $100 million annually — although, in practice, there is significant year-to-year wiggle room within that 5% threshold.
That payout requirement does apply to the family’s smaller philanthropy, Endeavor Legacy Foundation. Perhaps as a result, it moved even more money than its larger sibling in 2022, a total of $28 million. And given the 5% requirement, its grantmaking likely rose even further in 2023. By contrast, the $2 billion Pauley Family Foundation, a supporting organization, has no such payout minimum.
“Due to significant illiquid assets, the foundation’s grantmaking as a percentage of total assets will vary from year to year,” with support for capital projects also causing fluctuations, Russell said. Presumably, those holdings consist of shares of Carpenter Co., the firm Stanley Pauley founded, but Russell would say only that the assets are “equity in a privately held company” and total $1.9 billion.
Nor will the foundation’s spending ramp up anytime soon. According to Russell, the foundation has set a goal of paying out 4% of its assets based on its average value over the past five years, but that rule only applies to the portion of the assets that are liquid — and currently only 12% of its $2.1 billion endowment qualifies.
So it’ll be some time before this giant’s grantmaking catches up to its sky-high assets.
In the long run, all those illiquid holdings could make for a boom time for Richmond nonprofits. By placing their family’s fortune with the community foundation, the Pauleys have left a remarkable legacy for the state, city and community they so clearly loved.
In the short term, however, the situation is another reminder that under current tax laws, wealth can move en masse to charitable structures — with the tax advantages that entails — without reaching the hands of working charities at nearly the same speed. That’s not exactly a mark against the Pauley family, but it seems like one against our tax system.
